2019 comes to a close, and with it the 2010s. Below are a few thoughts on these periods of time. The most significant book I’ve read in 2019 is probably Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The German title, literally “Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule” more closely reflects the contents of this monograph. Arendt […]
I’ve just come back from Biohackathon 2012 in Toyama, an annual event, traditionally hosted in Japan, where users of semantic web technologies (such as RDF and SPARQL) in biology and bioinformatics come together to work on projects. This was a nice event with an open and productive atmosphere, and I got a lot out of […]
New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease […]
It is likely that few features cause as much problems as pointers and references in statement-oriented languages, such as C, C++ and Java. They are powerful, yes, and they allow us to control quite precisely how a program is to represent something. We can use them to conveniently compose objects and data without the redundancy […]
In May 2010 I reviewed the state of Monomorphic as a blog. Since it’s now been almost 13 months since that time, let’s evaluate what’s happened in the meantime. Where am I, how did I get here, and where do I go next? The rate of publication has decreased. Prior to the last evaluation, 55 […]